At some points during the night, Harvard had to have been wondering whether it was really shooting against a human goaltender or a backboard.

For the majority of the night, the Big Red’s Amanda Mazzotta seemed impenetrable, allowing Cornell to head to the Twin Cities off a four-goal victory despite registering only 18 shots, half of the Crimson’s 36.

“Our attitude throughout the game was just to keep playing, keep putting shots on net, keep trying to get chances,” co-captain Kathryn Farni said. “I thought we played really hard, and we took a lot of great shots.”

But Mazzotta was unfazed. Perhaps because she’d seen them twice before, the sophomore goaltender turned back shots from most of the Crimson’s usual suspects, including juniors Kate Buesser and Liza Ryabkina and freshman Jillian Dempsey.

Perhaps it was not surprising, then, that the two skaters who stumped Mazzotta and the Big Red defense were senior Randi Griffin and junior Leanna Coskren. Despite ranking fourth and fifth among Harvard’s scoring leaders, respectively, neither had scored on Mazzotta in the two earlier matchups between the teams.

“When we put a lot of pressure on their goaltender, she did a really good job,” Stone said. She put the rebounds into the corners. When she left something there, they did a good job of keeping us from getting in.”

—Staff writer Christina C. McClintock can be reached at ccmcclin@fas.harvard.edu.